Tourist Trapped: Long Island Medium Live! (In Stockton)

My good friend Adam confessed once, “If the Long Island Medium ever comes to the Bay Area, I am going to see her.” The ‘Long Island Medium‘ is Theresa Caputo, a colorful reality show star with her own show on TLC where she communicates with the dead for tearful clients in between flashy reality show outbursts. Theresa has big hair, big nails, a big accent, and very watchable personality, provided you consider the aforementioned watchable.

Since I’ve known him, Adam has always been trying to schedule a sit down with a psychic medium. He’s even on Caputo’s 2-year long waiting list for a private reading. And while I’m skeptical about the whole thing, I can empathize with Adam’s motivation. He lost his mother when he was 17. So when he found out that Long Island Medium was coming to Stockton, Adam bought two tickets, booked a room at the Stockton Hilton, and we hit the road.

(photo: www.tlc.com)

We arrived at Stockton’s Bob Hope Theater at 7:30 for the 8 p.m. show, and the people-watching alone was worth the trip. The crowd was easily 75% female, and there were lots of women who shared Theresa Caputo’s fashion sense. Crunchy, over-styled hair, sequin appliqués, fake nails, wedge-heels flapping under neon-manicured toes: we were much closer to Long Island than we were to San Francisco. Couples sat in the stunning, vintage theater embracing huge buckets of popcorn, and most of the men in attendance seemed to be there against their will. The woman sitting directly in front of Adam brought her own battery-powered fan which she held directly in front of her face for the 2+ hour show.

At 8 on the dot, the lights dimmed, and the crowd immediately applauded. A voice came over the loudspeaker and asked us to stand for the national anthem. Adam and I shot each other the side-eyes and slowly stood. A screen on stage displayed a photo of the American flag while we listened to Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl version of the “Star Spangled Banner.” I assume the song was a recording, and not the first of many personal appearances from heaven. I can’t be sure.

Next, Theresa Caputo came on stage to mass hysteria. First things first, she asked all of the veterans in the theater to stand and be acknowledged. Then, the Long Island Medium gave us a lecture on her entire life story, how she believes this whole medium things works, facts about the afterlife, and her rules. Among the things Theresa shared, there is a heaven but no hell. There are levels of heaven depending on how many lessons a “spirit” needs to learn. And there will be no yelling. Theresa communicates with the dead through a “library of signs and symbols.” Signs include the feeling of choking or a red rose. Occasionally she would stop mid-sentance, lose her train of thought, and blame it on the dead. Because when you die, you hang out on your level of heaven until an over-accessorized reality star comes to the worst town near your loved ones and charges them $80 to maybe translate your vague message of love to them.

After 30 minutes, Theresa finally announced, “I don’t know about you, but I feel the need to read!”

There were 2,000 people in the theater, and Caputo did maybe 15 or 20 readings. She walked herself down into the aisles, followed by a camera crew and a couple of producers so her readings could be broadcast on a screen for the whole theater to see. Sometimes, Theresa would be specific. “Who here lost a son and a daughter?” Other times, she was ridiculously vague. “Who lost a father figure.” And a father figure, of course, means anyone who was fatherly in any capacity to you. EVER.

Caputo’s routine was to pick one of the many people who raised their hand to one of her prompts, and then offer things like, “It was unexpected, right?” The selected person, now on screen and nervously clutching a microphone, would either immediately start crying and sob, “Yes!” Or they would say, “No it was a long illness.” Then Theresa responds, “But it still felt sudden to you. That’s what he’s telling me, that you were still surprised when he died.” Nods, tears.

Sometimes, she hit the nail on the head. “You thought you saw him in public once?” The audience member had actually taken a photo of a stranger, the resemblance to their loved one was so profound. “Who has the ultrasound photo?” A woman on the aisle right next to Theresa had actually kept the ultrasound photo of her stillborn child in her purse. “My husband doesn’t even know that.”

Caputo asked a stoic, tattooed gentleman, “You were going to get a tattoo he (the deceased) had?” Indeed, that was the plan. The tattoo in question reads, “100% Half Breed.” Theresa took this opportunity to mug for the camera and the audience. “That doesn’t make any sense!” Often, Caputo would take minutes of precious fake-reading time to crack bad jokes to the camera, or mug a series of wacky faces, faces that a mom from Long Island would think were really clever. While she does this, Theresa’s subject is inconsolable. In fact, most people began crying the second Theresa locked eyes on them.

Adam asked me if I hoped to communicate with anyone. While I really don’t believe in this at all, I’d love to hear from my grandfather. Halfway through the show, Theresa asked the side of the theater opposite us, “Who carries a driver’s license?” I turned to Adam. “I have my grandfather’s driver’s license. I have it in my wallet right now.”

The weird thing was, a dozen people raised their hands. It’s apparently not rare or weird to hang on to a dead person’s driver’s license. Grief is powerful and universal. I think that’s how The Long Island Medium manages to guess right all the time, because again, I think this is fake. She’s just very knowledgable about all the weird ways humans grieve.

One woman in the audience had a son who drowned in the pool while she was sleeping (not, as Theresa guessed, doing laundry). For obvious reasons, the woman had a lot of guilt. According to Theresa, an 8-year old spirit once explained to her that had he not drowned, he would have died in a car accident the very next week on his way to baseball practice. Thus, we shouldn’t have guilt when kids die on our watch because they were going to die one way or another. This is the point in the show when Theresa Caputo, Long Island Medium, began to lose Adam.

Enthusiasm… gone.

Another man in the audience lost his cousin to a violent crime. Theresa seemed to already know this. “He’s telling me the police haven’t solved the crime.” That was correct. Theresa went on with what was becoming a standard message from beyond, “You have to let go of that anger, and focus on your memories of him. He knows how much you love him. He’s telling me you were a good cousin.”

Um, why doesn’t he tell you who killed him?

Everyone else in the audience seemed to be eating Theresa up. At one point, she was rambling on about dead people and rhetorically asked, “I forget everything. I forget my own birthday.” Several super-fans shouted out, “It’s Monday!” Many were desperate for a reading no matter what. One woman actually got in a tense back and forth with another audience member over a baby killed in a car accident just last week. The story has been all over the news, and we seemed to have many experts in the audience. After a lecture on being nice to one another because we’re all, you know, going to die, Theresa asked the woman her relation to this baby. “My sister’s best friend’s mom knows them.”

As she started to wrap things up, Theresa would hustle down an aisle and say something like, “Who lost a sister? A sister with an M?” Two hands would shoot up. Theresa looked at both of them, “She says to tell you it was a beautiful funeral.” And then she was off, shooting a message from the grave at someone else.

Occasionally, after lots of prodding with a particularly difficult subject, they’d finally reveal, “Oh yeah, he did love Frank Sinatra!” or “You mentioned getting the same tattoo a few readings ago, and I think that’s for me. Also, I was born on the 17th, which you asked about earlier. And I lost twins, a boy and a girl.” With that, Theresa Caputo would turn to the camera, and thus the audience, and scream in her admittedly charming Long Island accent, “See?!?! What’d I tell you? Nothing is a coincidence!”

Weird. Because that is exactly what I would describe as a coincidence.